“Just don’t call it ‘Highland Emo'”

Fat Cat recording artists The Twilight Sad â€” whose Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters was my favorite debut of 2007 â€” spoke recently with The Scotsman about their success in The States and how, curiously, it has outshined the response in their native Scotland:

“Last year was huge for the Twilight Sad â€” who come from around Kilsyth â€” not that we know the half of it here in Scotland. The band … played 160 gigs over 12 months. Only a handful of them, however, were in Scotland.”

Writer Chitra Ramaswamy calls the group’s visceral sound a mixture of “the quiet-loud crescendo of discordant noise we associate with Mogwai, with the dour, heavily accented poetry of Arab Strap.” (I’d trade Arab Strap for Idlewild, but that’s just me.)

“There may only be four of them, but Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters has an astonishingly layered sound, making use of accordions, theremin, piano, a crashing rhythm section and a hell of a lot of white noise.”

The piece also reveals that the band members still live with their parents and are planning a major domestic push in 2008 when they will road-test some new material, which, if you believe everything you read in newspapers is “apparently even ‘bigger and noisier’ than the epic, shoegazing sound of their debut.”